Facing Voters With Assist From a Film

By BRENDA GOODMAN

Published: August 7, 2006

The money, endorsements and opinion polls favor her opponent, but Representative Cynthia A. McKinney, who represents Georgia's Fourth District, has been counting on a movie for last-minute help with the Democratic primary runoff vote here on Tuesday.

The movie, ''American Blackout,'' is a documentary that embraces Ms. McKinney as a progressive heroine while chronicling the alleged disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida and Ohio in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

After winning prizes on the festival circuit, including a special jury award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the movie, directed by Ian Inaba, was headed for commercial release on cable television until Ms. McKinney's scuffle with a Capitol police officer last March helped put a damper on that plan. Ms. McKinney, who is black, was accused of striking the officer, who is white, after he tried to stop her from entering a House office building. A grand jury declined to indict Ms. McKinney.

But ''American Blackout'' was rushed to Atlanta last week, where it opened on Friday at the Landmark Midtown theater, and instantly became a factor in Ms. McKinney's fight to ward off a challenge from Hank Johnson, a former DeKalb County commissioner.

Ms. McKinney has been promoting the movie on her campaign Web site. And though she is famous for letting reporters' questions ricochet cleanly off her wide smile, she has made herself available to the news media in recent days to talk about film, which she says spotlights issues the mainstream media have ignored.

''I'm not going to talk about myself, personally,'' Ms. McKinney said during a phone interview last week, ''but the larger disservice is being done to the American people who rely on the press to provide the facts.''

Whether political documentaries affect the outcome of elections is an open question. Michael Moore released his anti-George W. Bush film ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' in the heat of the 2004 presidential campaign, but Mr. Bush was re-elected. Earlier this year Robert Greenwald announced distribution plans for the movie ''The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress,'' which he produced, during a primary. Mr. DeLay, a longtime Republican representative from Texas, eventually resigned his seat and left Congress, but the documentary was only a tiny factor in the media storm following his indictment on money laundering charges last year.

''I think they do reinforce and intensify people's feelings,'' Michael Cornfield, who teaches political strategy and message at George Washington University, said of political documentaries. Do movies influence how or if people vote? ''That's more aspirational than empirical,'' he said.

Still, they try. In late July the producers of ''American Blackout,'' which was made by the Guerilla News Network, a nonprofit group with operations in New York and California, announced plans to release the film on DVD, including as a special feature interviews with four men, their faces and voices disguised, identified only as black officers with the Capitol Police. The officers, who call the Capitol Hill ''the last plantation,'' say their white colleagues often made a sport of stopping black members of Congress at security checkpoints, thus bolstering contentions that Ms. McKinney's troubles with the police were the result of provocation.

''I'm so happy that filmmakers are taking on the role of investigative journalists,'' Ms. McKinney said. ''And I'm so happy that we have an alternative media that has arisen as a result of the public's craving for fact rather than faction.''

To make ''American Blackout'' Mr. Inaba trailed Ms. McKinney for three years, beginning in 2002, as she became the subject of a number of negative news reports because of a quote extracted from a California radio interview. Taken out of context the paraphrased statement seemed to suggest that Ms. McKinney believed the Bush administration was involved in a conspiracy that led to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Inaba restores the two sentences that preceded her infamous ''What do they have to hide?'' query, showing that she had asked why both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney placed phone calls to Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, then Senate Majority Leader, urging him not to investigate the disaster. ''What do they have to hide?'' Ms. McKinney asked.

Mr. Inaba's cameras were still recording later that year, when Ms. McKinney was placed in the crosshairs of a successful ''Anybody but Cynthia'' campaign to get Republicans to cross party lines for the 2002 primary to vote her out of office.

''American Blackout'' is Mr. Inaba's first feature-length film. He left careers in investment banking and software development to pick up a camera because, he said, he ''wanted to make something.'' Before he plunged into documentary filmmaking, he directed a politically themed music video called ''Mosh'' for the rapper Eminem and a video for the rock group Nine Inch Nails, which, Mr. Inaba said, wasn't distributed because the group was afraid it would be too controversial.

Ms. McKinney, for her part, was able to reclaim her seat in 2004 after running a largely grassroots campaign. It was a victory she called ''one of the greatest political comebacks of all time.''

Two years later, though, after a rash of public criticism over her run-in the Capitol Police officer, the portrayal of Ms. McKinney's phoenix-like career in ''American Blackout'' looks eerily familiar.

Republicans have endorsed and funded her relatively unknown challenger, Mr. Johnson, and the Web site that championed her ouster in 2002, goodbyecynthia.com, is once again up and running.

''Voters are very energized and tuned in and believe this is a very important race,'' said Deb McGhee Speights, press secretary for Mr. Johnson. ''We believe the voters will make their decisions in this election based on something closer to home than a movie.''

Photo: Ian Inaba, director of ''American Blackout,'' which is playing in Atlanta. (Photo by Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times)(pg. E7)